Do an overland, learn a language

Colin takes advantage of being stuck in a traffic jam and asks another driver for directions

I’m constantly amazed to hear and watch Colin and Danny, our driver and guide for this trip, babble away in Portuguese.

When we met them late last year in Argentina, neither of them knew any Portuguese, and Danny had only had some lessons in Spanish. But now! Wow!

I am so impressed because theirs isn’t your simple order-a-meal or find-the-hotel touristic gumpf. Theirs is a proper manage-in-Portuguese and read-the-newspaper language—all in a total of about four months of travelling in Brazil.

We get to Peru soon and they’ll have to switch to their Spanish—another new talent. I asked Danny which was better—his Portuguese or his Spanish. He says he has more Spanish vocabulary and better Portuguese pronunciation.

It reminds me of advice given by Lu, the guide on our 24-week, London to Sydney overland. Her view was that you spend a lot of time sitting in a truck—looking out the window, reading, sleeping or listening to an iPod—so you might as well have that iPod loaded with language lessons.

She was so right! My language skills improved tremendously when we did the overland in Africa. I used lots of French in West Africa, and even some Arabic because the Lebanese run many of the shops there. Arabic came in handy again for the tail-end of that trip when we travelled between Sudan and Syria.

So we decided to follow good Lu’s advice.

Last year, we were going to have more than six months of travel, starting with about six weeks in North America and the remainder in South America, mainly in Spanish-speaking countries.

A couple of months before setting out, we bought two sets of Spanish language CDs and did some practice, especially in the car. The CDs then got loaded on to my iPod and when we started our travels in the USA—guess what?—the volume on the iPod had somehow been set to low, low, low.

It kept asking for a code, even though I’d never set a code. I tried every four-digit number combo I’d ever used in the past, but nothing. I visited Apple stores in the US and Canada and nobody could help. Even Google didn’t have an answer.*

So our good intentions and language lessons languished on an unused iPod. 😦 Infuriating, but that’s the way it was. Still the bits we remembered from the earlier practice came in handy in restaurants and shops.

By the time we decided to do this overland, which focuses almost completely on Brazil, I forgot about buying language CDs, so we’ve only made a little headway on Portuguese.

It’s frustrating because it’s such a wonderful opportunity—printed words and sounds abound, there’s the chance to practice every day and it gives you a lot more insight into the places you visit and people you meet.

So I swear, next trip, I’ll set out to learn or relearn some language.

* In the last two weeks of travel, I finally tried 0000 as the code on my iPod and it worked. You’d think Google or someone in an Apple store might have suggested that.